UPDATED 06:26 EDT / OCTOBER 24 2013

NEWS

Pinterest Raises $225M, Moves to Expand Globally

Social scrapbooking service, Pinterest, has once again raked in some massive funding.

According to AllThingsD, Pinterest has raised $225 million in a Series E funding round led by Fidelity Investments, with the participation of current investors Andreessen Horowitz, FirstMark Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners and Valiant Capital Management.

“We hope to be a service that everyone uses to inspire their future, whether that’s dinner tomorrow night, a vacation next summer, or a dream house someday. This new investment enables us to pursue that goal even more aggressively,” said  Ben Silbermann, CEO and co-founder of Pinterest.

This round of funding will be used to invest in technical infrastructure to make the service faster, more reliable and efficient, and to acquire strategic talent and technology, all of which will hopefully boost the company’s international efforts. Pinterest plans to expand into 10 more countries by the end of the year.

Back last February, Pinterest raised $200 million in a Series D funding round led by Valiant Capital Management with the participation of existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners and FirstMark Capital.

In May, Pinterest raised $100 million with half of it coming from Rakuten, the largest e-commerce site in Japan, eyeing the country for expansion.  The company also recently expanded into Italy, France and England, and has hired country managers, its first international employees, to oversee its global expansion.

In Latin America and Europe, Pinterest has partnered up with network carrier Telefónica to have Android phones come equipped with a Pinterest widget by default.  Though this is an unpaid partnership, it aims to encourage more people to sign up for the service.  The app auto-updates on the home-screen and allows unregistered people to browse Pinterest pins.

In September, comScore showed that Pinterest has 24.9 million unique monthly users, and that’s just in the US and counting only desktop users, but AllThingsD reported in March that when international and global users are considered, Pinterest had close to 50 million unique monthly users worldwide.

The Telefónica deal may not help Pinterest make money, but it will help the company rake in millions more mobile users. The company may enter more partnerships such as this one in other regions to help boost its mobile presence.


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